Cancer Ward, novel by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Though banned in the Soviet Union, the work was published in 1968 by Italian and other European publishers in the Russian language as Rakovy korpus. It was also published in English translation in 1968.

Solzhenitsyn based Cancer Ward on his own hospitalization and successful treatment for supposedly terminal cancer during his forced exile in Kazakhstan in the mid-1950s. The novel’s iconoclastic main character is Oleg Kostoglotov, like the author a recently released inmate of the brutal forced labour camps. His fellow patients in the provincial city hospital are a microcosm of Soviet society.

country of Central Asia. It is bounded on the northwest and north by Russia, on the east by China, and on the south by Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and the Aral Sea; the Caspian Sea bounds Kazakhstan to the southwest. Kazakhstan is the largest country in Central Asia and the ninth largest...

labour performed involuntarily and under duress, usually by relatively large groups of people. Forced labour differs from slavery in that it involves not the ownership of one person by another but rather merely the forced exploitation of that person’s labour.